Anti-arms trade campaigners in Nottingham handed out hundreds of leaflets to people attending a health conference next door to arms company Heckler & Koch on Wednesday 26th September. The conference, called Good Health in Hard Times, took place at the Trent Vineyard church, which occupies Units 1 & 2 at Easter Park – an industrial park on Lenton Lane. The arms company, which makes submachine guns and assault rifles, operates from the unmarked warehouse at Unit 3.

A group of performance artists and activists has come up with a bold plan to rid the world of the scourge of Heckler & Koch weapons – to seal the factory inside a concrete sarcophagus. Just as a the damaged nuclear reactor at Chernobyl was encased in concrete to protect the world from radioactive emissions, so the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Centre for Political Beauty) intends to seal off Heckler & Koch’s main factory in Germany in order to prevent its harmful products from escaping and causing further loss of life.

Campaign Against Arms Trade has produced a map of the arms trade in the UK. The aim of the project is to map the whole UK arms trade, allowing people to find where their local arms companies are and take action against them. Currently the map only shows companies that exhibited at the latest DSEi arms fair but more companies will be added in the coming months.

At the moment there are eight Nottinghamshire-based companies on the map, including Infrared Security Solutions and Heckler & Koch. Notts Anti-Militarism’s own Map of Militarism shows a few more arms companies in the area, but the CAAT map is a collaborative project, and people are encouraged to submit information so that the map grows over time.

As well as showing arms companies, CAAT’s map shows demonstrations. It currently includes information on two protests against Heckler & Koch – the regular monthly picket which will take place on Monday August 13th, and a bike tour in which young Christian activists from SPEAK will ride from RAF Waddington to Heckler & Koch on Saturday August 11th.

The map is still under development. It should soon be possible to add photos of companies and demonstrations to the map. If you would like to add a company or a demonstration to the map, you can do so via the CAAT website.

Police in Germany have once again raided the headquarters of arms company Heckler & Koch, this time amid allegations that the company has been bribing Mexican officials to get lucrative arms deals. Around 300 officers raided company premises on November 10th, as well as the homes of several H&K executives.

According to the Stuttgart prosecutor, H&K bribed Mexican officials from 2005 to 2010, and possibly bribed German officials too. The company was also raided last December by police investigating H&K’s illegal sale of weapons for Mexican states that are known to commit serious human rights violations.

The arms company has an international sales office in Nottingham, at Unit 3, Easter Park on the Lenton Lane industrial estate. Local campaigners believe that the company’s business is unethical and that it should be shut down.

When Libyan rebels stormed Gaddafi’s Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli in August, they seized a stockpile of brand new Heckler & Koch assault rifles, which they promptly turned against government forces. Now German prosecutors have launched an investigation into how these weapons came to be supplied to the Libyan dictatorship.

H&K, which now finds itself the under investigation for possible violation of the War Weapons Control Act, has admitted that the weapons came from a tranche of 608 rifles and 500,000 rounds of ammunition that the company supplied to Egypt’s autocratic regime in 2003.

The company has an international sales office in Lenton, Nottingham. Local residents are calling for it to be shut down, pointing to the company’s long track record of supplying arms to authoritarian regimes, including several of those that have brutally suppressed the popular uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’.

A spokesperson for the Shut Down H&K campaign said “This company’s business is immoral, and its employees are complicit in the abuses of the repressive regimes that they help to arm. We should not tolerate such a company to operate in our city.”

Although the sale took place before the current wave of unrest began, H&K cannot have been unaware of the repressive nature of the Bahraini regime. In 2009, the year the ammo was supplied, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported that Bahraini police were carrying out abductions, torture and beatings of political activists.

By arming repressive regimes such as this, H&K is complicit in the human rights abuses they commit. The company has an international sales office in Nottingham, which has been the target of numerous protests in the four years since it was discovered by local anti-arms-trade campaigners.

On Febuary 27th, as pro-Gaddafi militias and mercenaries were patrolling the streets of Tripoli, a video was posted to YouTube showing Saif al-Gaddafi, son of Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, rallying supporters and promising to send them weapons to fight the protesters.

In the video, Saif Gaddafi can clearly be seen toting a Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifle. In a subsequent interview, Saif was asked by Channel 4 Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Miller about the “AK-47” he was brandishing in the video. Showing his pride for the weapon, Saif replied “That was not an AK; that was a Heckler.”

Welcome

This blog is all about Nottingham-based opposition to the arms trade. If you would like to be notified about upcoming events and important campaign news, you can subscribe to the mailing list on the web or by sending an e-mail to nottsantimilitarism-subscribe (at) lists.riseup.net.